Surveillance Inc: How Western Tech Firms Are Helping Arab Dictators

By Trevor Timm & Jillian C. York

As democratic movements spread in the Middle East, governments are cracking down, and that means big business for the companies who help them do it.

A computer systems coordinator at Tunisia Television in Tunis / Reuters

Reliance means vulnerability, and the activists and citizen
journalists of the Arab uprisings rely heavily on the Internet and mobile
technology. They use text messaging to coordinate protests, for example, or
social media sites to upload the photos and videos that then make it into
mainstream global media. In the first protests in Tunisia, because traditional
journalists could not get access, citizen journalists filled in, using YouTube
and the live-streaming platform UStream to give the world -- including, for
example, the Egyptians and Syrians who later began revolts of their own -- a
window into the events there.

For all of the good this technology has done, activists are also
beginning to understand the harm it can do. As Evgeny Morozov wrote in The
Net Delusion, his book on the Internet's darker sides, "Denying that
greater information flows, combined with advanced technologies ... can result in
the overall strengthening of authoritarian regimes is a dangerous path to take,
if only because it numbs us to potential regulatory interventions and the need
to rein in our own Western corporate excesses."

The communications devices activists use are not as safe as
they might believe, and dozens of companies -- many of them based in North
America and Europe -- are selling technology to authoritarian governments that
can be used against democratic movements. Such tools can exploit security flaws
in the activists' technology, intercept a user's communications, or even
pinpoint their location. In many cases, this technology has led to the arrest,
torture, and even death of individuals whose only "crime" was exercising their
universal right to free speech. And, in most of these cases, the public knew
nothing about it.

"The Chinese could come here and learn from you."

Recent investigations by the WallStreetJournal
and BloombergNews have revealed
just how expansively these technologies are already being used. Intelligence
agencies throughout the Middle East can today scan, catalogue, and read
virtually every email in their country. The technology even allows them to change
emails while en
route to their recipient, as Tunisian authorities sometimes did before the
revolution.

These technologies turn activists' phones against them,
allowing governments to listen in on phone calls, read text messages, even scan
cell networks and pinpoint callers with voice recognition. They allow
intelligence agents to monitor movements of activists via a GPS locator updated
every fifteen seconds. And by tricking users into installing malware on their
devices -- as is currentlyhappening
in Syria - government agents can remotely turn on a laptop webcam or a cell
phone microphone without its user knowing.

In Syria recently, American journalist Marie Colvin and
French photographer Rémi Ochlik were killed by a mortar attack that may have
been targeted to the locations of their satellite
phones. We don't know for sure how the Syrian army tracked them, but
Lebanese intelligence had recorded Syrian officials as planning
to target Western journalists, and following satellite phone signals is
just one of the tech-aided ways they could have done it.

Syria and other abusive Middle Eastern regimes rely on
technology companies such as Area SpA, the Italian firm that contracted with
the regime there to build a surveillance center, and that pulled out only after
exposure by Bloomberg News prompted protests at their Italian headquarters. There's
also the American company Bluecoat Systems. When it was reported that their Internet-monitoring
equipment had been re-sold to the Syrian government, a senior VP told
the Wall Street Journal, "We don't
want our products to be used by the government of Syria or any other country
embargoed by the United States."

For all the evil of Syria's regime, it's hard to ignore the
role and often the complicity of Western technology companies that can
sometimes act as dictator's little helper. While Syria's use of surveillance
has been particularly egregious and well-documented, this problem goes far
beyond just one country. For years, Western firms have been selling
surveillance equipment to the most brutal regimes. And while sales to Syria often
violate sanctions policy, such companies can sell to many other authoritarian
countries -- many of them U.S. and E.U. allies -- without repercussions.

In pre-revolutionary Tunisia, surveillance firms gavediscounts
to a government agency because the firms wanted to use the country for testing
and bug-tracking. The technology was so advanced that it prompted the post-revolutionary
head of the Tunisian government's Internet agency toremark,
"I had a group of international experts from a group here lately, who
looked at the equipment and said: 'The Chinese could come here and learn from
you.'"

In Bahrain, dozens of political activists have testified
that the security officers who detained and beat them also read transcripts of
their text messages and emails likely gathered from technology purchased from Germany-based
Trovicor, a former Nokia Siemens subsidiary.
According to BloombergNews, a
spokesman for the latter confirmed
the sale and maintenance of this equipment to the Bahraini government.

"The bulk of this
digital arms trade happens under the radar.

Qaddafi's regime was later found to have spied on Al Jazeera
journalist Khaled Mehiri by monitoring his emails and Facebook messages usingtechnology
made by French company Amesys. Mehiri was later interrogated and threatened by
the head of Libya's intelligence service. The reporters who found Mehiri's
surveillance file in Tripoli's abandoned Internet monitoring center discovered
similar files on many other journalists, human rights advocates, and democratic
activists.

The mass surveillance industry is a large one -- estimates
now put the global market at $5 billion per year. The businesspeople
getting rich from the crackdown industry don't often talk to the media, but
some of the few who do can seem less than concerned about their potential role
in their clients' violence.

Jerry Lucas is the president of Telestragies Inc, the
company that runs ISS World, the trade show circuit (also known as the
"Wiretapper's Ball") that brings these companies and their clients together.
Asked by the Guardian in November if he would be comfortable
knowing that regimes in Zimbabwe and North Korea were purchasing the technology
from his trade shows, he responded, "That's just not my job to determine
who's a bad country and who's a good country." He added, "That's not our
business, we're not politicians ... we're a for-profit company. Our business is
bringing governments together who want to buy this technology."

This is the crux of the problem: These companies seem fully
aware of what they're doing - after all, the better they understand how to help
secret police find and terrorize dissidents, the better their products will do
on the market -- but far less concerned about the implications. As Dutch member
of the E.U. Parliament Marietje Schaake told us last week, "The bulk of
this digital arms trade happens under the radar; through spin-offs of
well-known companies, but mostly by players without a reputation to lose with
consumers."

Schaake, who has been leading an effort in Europe to halt the
sale of surveillance technologies to repressive regimes, helped pass E.U. export
restrictions to some government actors in Syria. In the U.S., Rep. Chris Smith introduced
a bill in the House that would require American companies listed on the stock
exchange to report to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on how they
conduct due diligence on human rights issues.

Unfortunately, apart from the work of a few individuals,
this problem has gone mostly ignored by Western governments, and the digital
surveillance trade still seems to be flourishing. Congress, the E.U., and the
U.N. all have the ability act -- by requiring the relevant companies to at
least transparently evaluate whether or not their technology is aiding in human
rights abuses, if not banning those sales outright -- but so far, even as
dozens of Syrians die every day, they haven't.